There seemed to be more than four walls-the living room I’d entered, a full dining room, a large bedroom, a small bedroom that had been set up as a sort of den and television parlor, and a kitchen with a fake brick floor and real brick walls and a lot of copper pots and pans hanging from iron hooks. The kitchen was my favorite room. The bedroom was all chintzy and virginal, the den angular and uninspired, and the living room an eclectic triumph featuring examples of bad taste down through the centuries. So I started in the kitchen and found six hundred dollars in the butter compartment of the refrigerator door.

Now the refrigerator’s always a good place to look. A surprising number of people keep money in the kitchen, and many of them tuck it into the fridge. Cold cash, I suppose. But I didn’t pick up the six hundred by playing the averages. I had inside information.

“The slut keeps money in the refrigerator,” Craig had told me. “Usually has a couple hundred stashed in the butter keeper. Keeps the bread with the butter.”

“Clever.”

“Isn’t it just? She used to keep marijuana in the tea canister. If she lived where people have lawns she’d probably store it with the grass seed.”

I didn’t look in the tea canister so I don’t know what kind of tea it contained. I put the cash in my wallet and returned to the living room to have a shot at the desk. There was more money in the top right-hand drawer, maybe two hundred dollars at most in fives and tens and twenties. It wasn’t enough to get excited about but I was getting excited anyway, the automatic tickle of excitement that starts working the instant I let myself into someone else’s abode, the excitement that builds every time I lay hands on someone else’s property and make it my own. I know this is all morally reprehensible and there are days when it bothers me, but there’s no getting around it. My name is Bernie Rhodenbarr and I’m a thief and I love to steal. I just plain love it.